Florence Just Another Saturday

The weekend can be hectic in Florence. This weekend we have a Chianti town called Lamole running wine tasting in my Piazza Republica. I can also hear some music coming from the piazza so I am almost drawn out of my apartment to see what’s going on.

It’s a communist demonstration moving around town. The procession is so long that I decide to do a bit of shopping in the supermarket at the other end of the lane. When I get there, the head of the procession has already arrived so I have to join them for a while and filter slowly across the road. Their music is dreadful but they have a superb drummer playing a small snare drum.

Having stocked my larder with the latest sottocosto items, I manage at last to get to my piazza. The wine tasting tent is there but I become interested in people wearing coloured overalls declaiming poetry in terza rima. I approach then and, to my surprise, I am handed a canto by Dante with an English translation on the reverse side of the paper. Someone is standing on a small stage reading the canto and she is surrounded by a crowd of people studying the text as she reads.

There’s a small tent at the side so I ask them what is going on. They attempt to explain something that is completely foreign to anybody who has been living in Australia for the last twelve years. You must understand that the section of coast, where I have been living, has almost the same population as Florence. Florence is a small town really. The arts life in Florence is phenomenal. But here again, the city is supporting an extraordinary day for Dante, a poet who was expelled from Florence and wrote much of his good stuff somewhere else!

I thought I really cared about music. But, as they explain what the day is all about, I am overcome with emotion for a city which has such priorities. Next to the Dante and the wine people is a tent supporting the banning of all motor vehicles from the city. They already have electric buses and light rail (Yes! We used to call them trams!!) tracks blossoming all over the city. They are even planning to build another bridge over the Arno only for light rail. To be fair, Brisbane has similar ideas for its transport although the bus tracks are still used by public transport powered by the ancient ICE technology. But I suppose we have to blame a Florence company in 1854 for inventing the first Internal Combustion Engine that was powerful enough to replace steam engines. That company is now a subsidiary of General Electic.

As usual, I have digressed! Back to Dante.

On my walk to the supermarket, I had encoutered a number of crowds listening to someone declaiming something which I had presumed was a text written by Marx. (Is there another text for Bolsheviks?) I realise now that they were declaiming Dante.

Bit by bit, I manage to understand exactly what they are doing. I know from music history that the number 3 was the number all artists were expected to respect and use in their art. This is very evident in Dante’s ‘Commedia’ or ‘Commedia Divina” as it was later called. The main text of the ‘Commedia’ is divided into 3 and, in each section, there are 33 cantos. What Florence is doing today is asigning 3×3 people to each canto of the ‘Commedia Divina’. Each reader wears a smock with the name of the section written on it and the number of the canto being read. The lettering on the smocks is also coloured according to the section from which the speakers read. Again, 3 colours! The speakers have even received training from the city!

I am listening to a person with a ‘Purgatory 19’ smock, which means that she is reading the 19th canto of the second section. Listeners are handed the text at each canto station around Florence so, in theory, you might acquire the entire text if you moved fast enough. You are even given a map of all the canto stations with your first individual text.

In Dante’s day, texts would be written in Latin, a universal written language throughout Europe. Even quite recently before the Catholic Church stopped using Latin in their services (but not in Florence, I notice!!!) Thanks to the internet, the universal language is now American English. English is spoken very widely in Florence, not only because there are American and British people here, but also because the amazing mix of scholars and tourists in the town means that speaking English is the only way that different nationalities can guarantee to be able to communicate with one another.

In England, we all studied a work by Chaucer, by Shakespeare and by later writers as part of the English courses. There’s a reason for starting with Chaucer. Although he was a highly reputable cog in the wheels of English government, he was able to visit Florence around the time of Dante, probably on another of his secret missions. I suspect that it is no coincidence that Chaucer was the first major English writer to employ his vernacular for a major work. The work, for which he is best known, is of course “The Canterbury Tales”.

In a similar way, Dante really established Italian as a language worthy of carrying great works of literature and poetry. He is in effect the founder of his country’s language. His ‘Commedia’ is therefore not only a great poem but also a priceless treasure in the establishment of a single language for Italy. It’s certainly worth celebrating. Today, this is happening.

After a whole day of speaking, all the participants are to assemble on the steps of the Duomo. When I go out to join in, I see television cameras plus large screens all over the town to cover the event. At eight o’clock, the huge Cathedral doors open and the ‘Inferno’ team emerge to partisan cheers from the crowd. Then my team ‘Purgatorio’ comes out and another section of the crowd go wild!!! Finally Paradiso takes its place and everybody claps and cheers. It’s like a football match!!

The finale of the day is a recitation of the last canto by all the particpants. I was told that there would be over 600 people performing but it looked more than that. I would be slightly unhappy if each canto were not read by 3 x 3 people. 33 cantos to each section. 3 sections. That makes 3 x 3 x 33 x 3 people!! Whatever the number, there are an awful lot of people reading Dante’s last canto of the ‘Commedia’ and the square is packed tight with people listening and following the text. It’s a wonderful sight to behold!!!! The cheering at the end is greater than at any football match. This could only happen in Florence?